The discussion below is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.
A large amount of electronic documents are prevalent today throughout organizations and on the Internet. These documents contain useful informational elements for a number of different purposes. In addition to explicit text within the documents, the documents include metadata that is indicative of a particular information retrieval element in a document. There are many different types of metadata for a document including title, author, date of creation, etc. Metadata in documents is useful for many kinds of document processing applications including search, browsing and filtering. Metadata can be defined by an author of the document to be used in these processing applications. However, authors seldom define document metadata appropriately. A search using only metadata, therefore provides limited results.
Other types of documents are available in organizations for intranet search to research people in an organization, and to research technical data. Documents, homepages and the like provide resources for search queries. Current methods of searching different types of data do not provide efficient search results appropriate for the type of search performed. In an Enterprise level search access to information for users is exacerbated. For example, most of the current enterprise systems try to solve this problem by using relevance search and display the results as a list of URLs. What is needed is a system and method that accounts for the type of search requested.